LUG Digital Library (internal)

The purpose of the LUG library is to provide members with access to texts, practice problems, relevant tutorials, and other educational materials to aid students with their studies. The library will also hold novels, comics, and other media for pleasure. All materials are either under public domain, released under a Creative Commons License, or released under the GNU/GPL. The library is not yet complete, and is still under implementation. A very low feature version will be available in the near future.

In the case of material that does not utilize any of the above licenses, permission must be granted by the copyright holder to posses and distribute the aforementioned material. This permission must be reflected in a signed, written document, and submitted to LUG in addition to the material.

All educational material must conform to UCLA policy, in that explicit answers and homework solutions cannot be posted. Departmental permission must be obtained before posting a midterm or final.

The main issue with creating a library is the restriction of data to members, as well as the loaning times. In a traditional physical library, only those who have a library card may "check out" material. Also, materials have to be returned in a given time frame, at the risk of paying a fine. While creation of a library is certainly a noble act, with the aim of making knowledge accessible, access control methods employed by libraries go against Open Source principal. We will have to develop mechanisms that will automatically delete or corrupt a given file, if downloaded, or restrict downloads entirely (i.e. everything would be viewed in the browser).

In order to comply with CS departmental policy, materials are under copyright to the professors that created them. This includes project specs, solution codes, exams, etc. Under the current policy, we are allowed to provide access to these materials, as long as they do not contain explicit solutions to homework. Solved midterms and finals that have been released are acceptable, are as any materials that have been approved by the professor for submission.